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Blogging & the Age of Tyrants

In the seventh and sixth centuries, B.C., there was an age known in history as the “age of the tyrants.”

It’s not like you think. These weren’t necessarily bad guys, with bull-whips and hellish intentions, exercising evil dominance and planning wicked schemes over a helpless and gullible people. Oh no, these tyrants were actually champions of the people. In other words, the people loved and supported them.

Most of the time, these tyrants were dead-set against aristocratic or plutocratic minorities, and that’s why they were loved by the masses. They actually contributed an enormous amount to the economic and cultural development of the city-states they ruled. In fact, tyranny only took on the modern meaning in a pejorative sense after democracy took its place.

Blogging these days has created a new age of tyrants. It has made champions for the people from those who have usurped authority to which they have no Biblical right. Anyone and everyone who has a blog can now teach as an ‘authority’ and be a champion of the people – even if they are unordained, unlicensed, not set apart by the Church and most importantly, uncalled of God to be an under-shepherd to the Church.

3 Comments

I think I agree with what I think your intent is. If it is your intention to say that you bemoan Lone Ranger types who are unaccountable to local churches and who take pot shots via blogs at those who seek to serve the Lord within the framework of the local church – then I am with you. If you are opposed to men not in spiritual authority feigning spiritual authority via their writings, I am with you. If you are withstanding busybody men that no church would recognize in any regard as genuinely thoughtful and spiritual and mature who nevertheless take to their blogs to stir up trouble, I am with you. However…

I am enough of a Baptist and sufficiently egalitarian to believe that one does NOT need to be ordained or licensed (I have never understood the Biblical counterpart to the notion of being licensed, though I recognize it is a view nearly universally embraced – but that is another issue for another time) to create and write for a blog. And though you don’t actually say otherwise, let me be perfectly clear – the notion that an unordained blogger is ipso facto a “tyrant” is a nonsequitur. Pastors can by tyrants, deacons can be tyrants, women can be tyrants, unordained men can be tyrants. Bloggers can be tyrants, but, unordained bloggers are not thus so simply for want of ordination. If you are a tyrant, it is based on conduct and content – not for want of pastorial standing and ordination. Agreed?

Hmmm, Unfortunately today it’s the ordained, licensed Doctors of Divinity that are leading the charge into apostasy. (present company excluded, of course) and it’s the unlearned, unrecognised, laity that are often the holding the fort against error.